Rights in the CDR

About the CDR’s Non-Exclusive Deposit Agreement

Depositors must agree to a Non-Exclusive Deposit Agreement before depositing their content in the CDR. The deposit agreement allows the CDR to distribute and preserve the deposited content. If the depositor holds the copyright for the submission, the depositor will retain their copyright once the content is deposited in the CDR. The depositor can submit their work elsewhere, including to other repositories and for publication.
Additionally, the depositor must agree that the submission is their original work and does not infringe on the rights of others. If the copyright is held by another entity, it is the responsibility of the depositor to seek permission to deposit.
It may be possible to restrict access to a deposited file for a set length of time or to the UNC community only. For more information, see the Access Restrictions policy.

Copyright

The author of a work is the copyright holder automatically at the point of creation and before any other agreements have been made. For work that has not yet been published, the author/creator usually can negotiate institutional repository permissions with the publisher prior to publication. Contact the Library’s Scholarly Communications Officer, Anne Gilliland, for assistance with modifying a publisher agreement or use the SPARC Author’s Addendum. For an online version of this form or for more information about author rights, visit SPARC Author Rights.
Copyright holders may prefer to use a Creative Commons License. Creative Commons allows creators to define preemptively the rights they wish to grant to others.  Only the copyright holder has the power to grant licenses. Full descriptions of the licensing options are available. The CDR will not assign a license to submitted works (except for data) by default, but depositors may select from all Creative Commons licenses. Data submissions will be assigned a CC0 license by default, but depositors may elect to use a CC-BY license or no license instead.
CDR depositors must select from several rights statements upon deposit. Rights statements denote the copyright status of the work, in contrast to licenses, which indicate the permissions that the rights holders want grant over their deposited content. Questions regarding rights statements can be referred to the Scholarly Communications Office.
The right statements available in the CDR are:

  • In Copyright (default)
  • No Known Copyright
  • Copyright Undetermined
  • No Copyright-United States

For more information, see the UNC Scholarly Communications Office’s Copyright Basics site.